Chapter 10 #2
I turned. The hallway light fell across my bare back. I felt him look at me—the full length of the exposed skin, the line of my spine, the place where the dress began again at the base of my back.
“Good choice,” he said.
He helped me into my coat. The gesture was practical—holding the collar, guiding the sleeves—but his hands lingered on my shoulders. His thumb traced the line of my neck where my hair ended.
We went to the car.
Il Cedro occupied a narrow storefront on Columbia Street, wedged between a bodega and a shuttered print shop. The awning was dark green, faded at the edges. A single menu was posted behind glass beside the door, the card yellowed and handwritten in Italian.
Inside, the restaurant was small. Eight tables, maybe nine. The ceiling was low and beamed. Candles on every surface—the tables, the bar, the windowsill. The walls were exposed brick, and the light was amber and close and turned everything warm.
The corner table sat beneath an old arched window. The glass was original— I could tell immediately. The arch followed a Gothic curve, and someone had repointed the brick surround in a mortar that almost matched the original.
Almost. The color was off by half a shade. Too grey. They’d used Portland cement instead of lime.
Daniil held my chair. I sat. He sat across from me. The candle between us threw light across his face and caught the edge of his jaw.
A server brought menus—heavy, leather-bound, the kind that suggested the restaurant had been here long enough to invest in its own gravity. The wine list was a separate card, printed on cream stock.
Daniil opened the menu. He read it the way he read security briefings—systematically, top to bottom, his eyes tracking each line with the focused patience of a man who did not skip entries.
I watched him.
He turned the page. He read the second page. He returned to the first page. He studied the specials card the server had placed between the salt and the candle.
“Daniil.”
He looked up.
“Are you conducting a security assessment of the specials?”
His mouth moved. The ghost of something. “I’m evaluating options.”
“You’ve read the menu twice.”
“I’m verifying the specials against the standard menu for redundancy.”
“That’s not how restaurants work.”
“You’d be surprised how often specials are just regular items with a different sauce.”
I picked up my own menu, flicked through. “You going to write a letter of complaint, Pakhan?”
Instead of replying to my question, he asked, “Have you already condemned the window repairs?”
The question caught me mid-sip of water. I set down the glass.
“The mortar,” I said.
“You’ve been staring at it since we sat down.”
“I haven’t been staring.”
“Your eyes went to the arch three times before you opened the menu.”
I narrowed my eyes at him. “I’m just . . . interested, that’s all.”
“Interested? Hmm.”
The server returned. We ordered—burrata, ravioli, sparkling water. Daniil ordered for both of us, and I let him, because the act of him choosing for me in a restaurant he had selected felt like an extension of something we had built in the library and the kitchen and the space between our chairs.
The burrata arrived on a small wooden board.
Cream pooled around the torn mozzarella.
Olive oil. Cracked pepper. A scatter of basil.
I tore bread and dragged it through the cream and ate, and the simplicity of it—good bread, good cheese, a candle, and the man across from me—made the restaurant feel like a room I had been looking for without knowing I was looking.
The ravioli came next. The pasta was thin. The braised beef filling was rich and dark and fell apart on the tongue. We ate in a silence that was not empty—it was full, the kind of quiet that happens when two people are occupying the same space with enough comfort that words become optional.
He reached across the table.
His hand found mine. I turned my palm beneath his—opened it, offered it—and threaded my fingers between his. The contact was warm and steady. His thumb rested against my knuckle. He did not let go.
I looked at our hands. His were larger, the knuckles broader, the fingers blunt and capable. Mine were narrower, the nails short from work, a faint callus on my right index finger from where I gripped pencils. Our hands fit together with a specificity that felt designed rather than discovered.
“Ksyusha.”
I looked up.
“The dress,” he said. “Thank you for wearing it.”
“I feel good in it.”
“I can tell.”
His thumb moved across my knuckle. A small, slow circle. The touch was precise and deliberate and I felt it in my wrist, my forearm, the inside of my elbow, the place below my shoulder where the dress began.
I wanted dinner to last. I wanted the bread and the ravioli and the candle and the arched window and his hand in mine. I wanted to sit in this corner and listen to him evaluate menu options and watch his mouth when he almost smiled.
I held his hand. I ate the last bite of ravioli. I did not let go.
The server cleared the ravioli plates and placed a panna cotta between us. Single portion. Two spoons. The cream quivered when the plate touched the table.
Daniil picked up his spoon. He set it down again.
“If nobody else had a claim on your time, and money was no object,” he said, “which restoration would you undertake?”
The question was careful. Not casual—he had been holding it, waiting for the right point in the evening to release it. I could tell by the way he placed it: no preamble, no lead-in, just the question itself set down between us the way he’d set down the agreement in the library.
I looked at him. The candle threw light across the hard line of his cheekbone, the pale color of his eyes.
He was watching me with the full, focused attention I had come to recognize as his particular form of interest—not polite, not performative, but the engaged attention of a man who wanted to understand something and intended to give it the time it required.
“There’s a bathhouse,” I said. “On the Red Hook waterfront. Abandoned since the seventies. The city owns it and has no idea what to do with it.”
I stopped. I picked up my spoon. I put it down.
“The entrance hall has original tile work. Encaustic. Geometric patterns—blues, creams, terracotta. Half of it is under six inches of standing water and half is exposed to the weather because the roof collapsed in the nineties. But the tiles are there. Underneath the grime and the mineral deposits and the decades of neglect, the patterns are intact.”
I was leaning forward. I hadn’t meant to. My elbows were on the table, my hands moving as I spoke, the gestures unconscious—tracing the geometry in the air between us.
“The high windows. They’re twelve feet, arched, steel-framed.
Someone boarded them in the eighties with plywood.
If you pulled the plywood out and cleaned the glass—original glass, Daniil, hand-set, with all the imperfections—the light that would come through that entrance hall would be extraordinary.
The way it would hit the tiles. The way it would change through the day. ”
I reached for the receipt. The server had left it in a small leather folder beside the candle. I pulled it out, turned it over, and picked up my pen from my bag.
I drew. Quick lines—the arched entrance, the proportions, the pattern of the tile layout I could see in my head. The geometric border. The central medallion. The way the steps wore down at the center of each tread because a hundred thousand feet had climbed them over fifty years.
“The steps,” I said, drawing. “Worn. Curved at the center of each tread. Everyone would want to replace them—new stone, level surface, clean lines. You don’t replace them.
You preserve the wear. That’s the record.
That’s the proof that people were here, that this building mattered, that it was used and lived in.
The wear is the history. You don’t erase it. ”
I looked up from the sketch. Daniil was watching me. His expression had shifted. It was warmer. Closer.
“The foundation,” he said. “If the roof collapsed, the water damage—how would you stabilize it?”
I stared at him.
“What?”
“The foundation. Water infiltration over forty years would compromise the structural integrity. What’s your approach?”
“You’re asking about the foundation.”
“I’m asking about your foundation. The one you’d build this project on.”
I set down the pen. The sketch sat between us on the back of the receipt—the arched window, the tile pattern, the worn steps. My handwriting was cramped from drawing too fast. There were ink smudges on my fingers.
“You would need to underpin,” I said. “Sequential. Section by section. You’d excavate beneath the existing footings and pour new concrete in stages, never more than a meter at a time, to prevent any shift in the load-bearing walls.
Then you’d install a perimeter drain to redirect the groundwater away from the foundation. ”
“And the tiles?”
“Conservator. We would need a specialist. You lift them individually, number them, document the pattern, clean them with a pH-neutral solution, repair the substrate, and relay them in the original configuration.”
“You’ve thought about this a lot.”
“I’ve thought about this for four years.”
He held my gaze. The candle flickered between us. The panna cotta sat untouched.
“What would you do?” I asked. “If nobody had a claim on your time.”
The question landed differently. I felt it the moment the words left my mouth—the shift in the air between us, the way his shoulders adjusted, the fractional pause before he spoke.
He looked at the candle. The flame reflected in his eyes—two small points of light in the pale blue.
“I prepared to be Pakhan before I considered whether I wanted it,” he said. “The preparation started when I was sixteen. Father decided I would inherit. Not because of my skill or my temprament, you understand. Just because I was eldest. The decision was made. My role was to be ready.”